Monday, August 05, 2013

Carnival of Evolution #60: Party like it’s 1953

I was out of town when the last two Carnivals of Evolution were published so I'm doing a bit of catchup. The June issue of Carnival of Evolution was hosted by Zen Faulkes at NeuroDojo. He's a invertebrate neuroethologist, whatever that is. Read: Carnival of Evolution #60: Party like it’s 1953.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special edition of the Carnival of Evolution. It’s the big six oh!

In honor of that achievement, we shall share this carnival’s space with other events celebrating their sixtieth anniversary.

If you want to host a Carnival of Evolution please contact Bjørn Østman. Bjørn is always looking for someone to host the Carnival of Evolution. He would prefer someone who has not hosted before but repeat hosts are more than welcome right now! Bjørn is threatening to name YOU as host even if you don't volunteer! Contact him at the Carnival of Evolution blog. You can send articles directly to him or you can submit your articles at Carnival of Evolution although you now have to register to post a submission. Please alert Bjørn or the upcoming host if you see an article that should be included in next month's. You don't have to be the author to nominate a post.

If you provide a cogent post-publication peer review showing that, indeed, The Pterosaur Heresies is schlecht, I will include your criticism (or a short hint at it) in the relevant passage of CoE#62 before Larry even noticed he's still a month late.

Well, if by "post-publication" you mean actual publication, nothing in Pterosaur Heresies has ever been published, as far as I know. Nor is anyone following Peters around critiquing each and every post as soon as it appears. But Darren Naish has a fine overall analysis of his methods and results. Try this.

Dear John Harshman, let me know, either publicly or via email (info@reptileevolution.com) what your problem is with pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com. Darren Naish was answered in a seven-part series at pterosaurheresies.com several years ago. There's no reason to put your faith in his propaganda. Use your reason and provide your own critique of pterosaurheresie.wordpress.com. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find there.

Next time on special edition of the Carnival of Evolution: New evolutionary views by Greg Venter:

VIDEO http://edge.org/conversation/craig-venter-life-what-a-concept

Craig Venter: LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!

"We discovered that almost every microorganism in the upper parts of the ocean has a photoreceptor similar to the ones in our own eyes. We knew there were one or two bacterial rhodopsins, but people thought they were rare molecules; it turns out it's probably one of the largest gene families on the planet. It's the same gene family that we have in our own eyes — our own rhodopsins, our visual pigments. Only instead of just capturing light information, these organisms capture a light, and convert it into cellular energy — non-photosynthetic, totally separate mechanism. When we set out to go to the Sargasso Sea surrounding Bermuda, all the marine microbiologists told us nothing was there, it was a desert, and we’d find only a few organisms. Instead we found tens of thousands of organisms in just a barrel of seawater. And the reason they said we wouldn't find anything is that there are no nutrients there; they said there are no nutrients, therefore there'll be no life. It turns out they don't need the nutrients because their energy is derived directly from sunlight.

LLOYD: Do you think perhaps that first use of rhodopsin was to harvest?energy?

VENTER: Quite possibly. And then it was adapted for visual pigments because it was a light-recognition molecule. And the other aspect of it is there's a wide range of new ones — and we have thousands of these now — and so lining up the proteins of all these, there's a single amino acid residue that determines the wavelength of light that the receptors see.

There's a single base change in the genetic code that determines the amino acid responsible for the wave length of light seen by the receptor. Changing one base in the genetic code can switch the light seen from for example blue to green. We found when we went back looking at the distribution of where these different rhodopsin molecules are, they totally segregate based on the color of water. The photoreceptors in the organisms in the deep indigo blue of the Sargasso Sea see blue light. You get into coastal water where there's a lot of chlorophyll, they see primarily green light. To me this is classical Darwinian selection. A single base pair determines the switch between blue and green. And whatever wavelength of light, it clearly provides a survival advantage for that environment.

It turns out, just looking at the populations, that this switch between blue and green has happened at least four times, back and forth. And so in one hand it seems like a classical reformation of Darwinian thinking. On the other hand, under each type of 16 S RNA, we have in fact hundreds to thousands of different cells, different genomes. Are they different species?

These are the types of species and definitions of life that I've been lately been devoting much of my professional career to. And it turns out these diverse organism share most of the gene content with each other and most of the gene order is conserved. But the sequence variations are as high as 60% between cell types. And according to classical Darwinism, this should not be the case, and it's not what anybody expected — there should be that one or a few species that survived and all the others died out."

That's fine by me even though evolution looks like a pile of bulls..t lol

Boring, boring and once again boring!!! This video and subject were discussed on this very blog long time ago by a creationist who claimed not to be a creationist. That was the time when I was just observing this blog with awe. He got banned eventually for..... not fulfilling his promises. He was a moron, so to speak. Don't become one or you are on his way buddy.

"It turns out, just looking at the populations, that this switch between blue and green has happened at least four times, back and forth. And so in one hand it seems like a classical reformation of Darwinian thinking. On the other hand, under each type of 16 S RNA, we have in fact hundreds to thousands of different cells, different genomes. Are they different species?

These are the types of species and definitions of life that I've been lately been devoting much of my professional career to. And it turns out these diverse organism share most of the gene content with each other and most of the gene order is conserved. But the sequence variations are as high as 60% between cell types. And according to classical Darwinism, this should not be the case, and it's not what anybody expected — there should be that one or a few species that survived and all the others died out."

Can you provide a link? Then, and only then, I will remove my comment.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.